Engineering Rock Mechanics

Additional points 9

Chuquicamata

surface

copper mine

El Teniente /

surface

copper mine

Figure 1.3 Location of the Chuquicamata and El Teniente copper mines.

of the Nathpa Jhakri hydro-electric power station and consists of four
siltation chambers with dimensions 525 m long, 16 m wide and 27 m
deep, built to exclude sediment particles above 0.2 mm from entering the
headrace tunnel and hence the turbines. The Nathpa Jhakri construction
project has many interesting features, including the Daj Khad shear zone
through which the headrace tunnel was driven 5.
The largest surface and underground mines are in Chile (Fig. 1.3): the
Chuquicamata open-pit copper mine and the underground El Teniente
copper and molybdenum mine. The Chuquicamata surface mine is in
the Atacama desert in northern Chile, and is several kilometres long and
750 m deep. The El Teniente mine in the foothills of the Andes is in
a zone of complex geology and high rock stress, and produces 90,000
tomes of ore per day.
The professional society for rock mechanics is the International So-
ciety for Rock Mechanics (ISRM) which was formed in 1963. The Sec-
retariat is based at the Laboratbrio Nacional de Engenharia Civil in
Lisbon, Portugal. There are about 5000 members. Each year, the Manuel
Rocha ISRM prize is awarded for the best PhD thesis submitted to the
ISRM Board. The ISRM distributes the ISRM News Journal which is a
magazine containing news and technical articles.
The authors of the first major textbook in rock mechanics, ’Funda-
mentals of Rock Mechanics’, were John C. Jaeger and Neville G.W.

A discussion of some of the rock mechanics analyses for the Nathpa Jhakri project
is contained in the paper of the Glossop Lecture given by Dr. E. Hoek to the Geological
Society of London Engineering Group in 1998 Hoek E. (1999) Putting Numbers to
Geology - An Engineer’s Viewpoint, Q. J. Eng. Geol., 32,1,1-19.